CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY

The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was one
of the most important forces in opening up
the Canadian Prairies to settlement. What the
Hudson's Bay Company did in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, the cpr
did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.

Following the formation of the Dominion
of Canada in 1867, arrangements were made
to transfer the Hudson's Bay Company territory,
known as Rupert's Land, to Canada. The
transfer of this territory, which comprises the
present-day Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan,
and Alberta, was completed in 1870. In
1871 the colony of British Columbia joined the
Dominion under the condition that a railway
be built to connect it to the east. After several
attempts, including more than five years of
construction by the Canadian government,
the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was
incorporated by act of Parliament on February
17, 1881. At that time the government of
Canada gave the new company $25 million
and 25 million acres of land in the Plains area
between Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains.

At the start of 1882 the company hired William
Cornelius Van Horne as its general manager.
Under his leadership, construction proceeded
at a record pace, and the first train
reached Calgary (now in the province of Alberta
but then in the Northwest Territories) in
the summer of 1883. On November 7, 1885, the
last spike in the main line was driven at Craigellachie
in the mountains of British Columbia,
and on June 28, 1886, the first through
transcontinental train departed Montreal for
the Pacific Coast, which it reached six days
later.

During the next thirty years the cpr built a
network of branch lines that connected many
Prairie communities with the main line. Until
other transcontinental railways were built, in
the first decade and a half of the twentieth
century the CPR was the only practical way of
reaching the Prairies. Its influence on the pattern
of settlement of western Canada from
1885 to 1914 cannot be overestimated.

As the CPR evolved, it began operating
ships, both oceangoing and inland, airlines,
and road transport as well as a chain of hotels.
By the mid–twentieth century it was advertising
itself as the world's greatest travel system
and using the slogan "CPR Spans the World." It
also began to exploit its oil and mineral resources
and involved itself in many other activities
besides transportation.

Today the 1881 company still exists as Canadian
Pacific Limited and still owns some of the
land originally granted. Since the majority of
its business is in the West, the company moved
its corporate headquarters from Montreal to
Calgary in the 1990s. With its large reserves of
oil, gas, and coal and its various transportation
divisions, including the railway with which it
started, Canadian Pacific Limited is still an important
component in the ongoing development
of western Canada.